Approximately
forty years ago, diseases like chicken pox, measles, whooping cough,
mumps, malaria—and tuberculosis—had been completely eradicated from
North America. Then two things happened. AIDS happened. And a lax attitude
about border security happened. AIDS became a political football for
the secular progressives in Washington. So did border security and turning
a blind eye to illegal aliens invading this nation like Santa Ana's
march on the Alamo. Only the illegals didn't stop in San Antonio. Like
a flood of stagnant water cascading through a broken dike, illegals
have flooded the entire United States. Unlike the lawful alien nationals
who are required to pass a medical exam when they respectfully seek
admission to the United States—illegal aliens, when they sneak across
the border (usually because they can't meet the legal requirements for
an entry visa) come with their detrimental baggage—usually a criminal
or medical history that will disqualify them from even a 24-hour visitor's
visa.

Some
of them, like 17-year old Francisco Santos, an alien who claimed legal
status but couldn't prove it, showed up at Gwinnett Medical Center
in Lawrenceville, Georgia in medical distress one evening not long ago.
On the form he was required to fill out, he listed his country of origin
as Mexico. Santos was diagnosed as having highly contagious multi-drug
resistant tuberculosis [MDR-TB]. Santos had no idea how he contracted
MDR-TB. He tried to leave the hospital, telling hospital personnel that
he was going back to Mexico. Authorities managed to get an emergency
court order and placed him in isolation at the medical facility at Gwinnett
County Jail until he could be surrendered to ICE for deportation. How
did Santos get MDR-TB? Just being part of a close-contract stream of
hundreds of illegals who bring deadly diseases like AIDS and MDR-TB
into this country every day believing that America's "free medical care"
would cure them.

Amado
Isidro Armendariz Amaya, on the other hand, is not an illegal. He's
a successful Juarez businessman who builds high-rise apartment buildings.
Armendariz is a man with powerful political connections. He's also a
frequent flyer. In the last five years, Armendariz, who comes from the
State of Chihuahua, has flown out of Juarez 21 times. Armendariz has
MDR-TB. Within the last year, Armendariz lost his father and sister
to the drug-resistant TB. The government of Vicente Fox knew about Armendariz's
condition for the better part of a decade. For the last five years Armendariz
was not forced to comply with Mexican Health Department protocols (although
he began taking treatments in April of this year. It appears he was
allowed to treat himself until that time.) Armendariz traveled by plane
to the United States and other countries for business reasons 21 times
In the past five years. He took 11 wholly domestic flights in the United
States in which American citizens were exposed to his deadly strain
of tuberculosis.

Stop
and think for a minute what about the fervor raised when the 31-year
old Atlanta, Georgia lawyer Andrew Speaker—who also has MDR-TB—traveled
to Europe looking for a cure for his highly contagious drug resistant
tuberculosis, and was caught on a flight back into the United States
from Canada. When they investigated, the Centers for Disease Control
[CDC] discovered that Speaker had been on seven domestic and international
flights—two of which lasted longer than eight hours. (The World Health
Organization [WHO] tuberculosis guidelines which have been officially
adopted by the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] and the
CDC, require that airlines inform passengers that someone afflicted
with highly contagious, deadly MDR-TB shared the air in a passenger
compartment with them only if the flight lasts eight hours or more.)
That, of course, minimizes panic—and avoids those nasty lawsuits when
the passenger is diagnosed with MDR-TB a few years later with no knowledge
that they had been exposed to the mycobacterium on a flight they shared
with Amado Armendariz, Andrew Speaker or some other passenger with MDR-TB
when those infected people should have been placed in sanatoriums the
moment they test positive for any form of TB..

Dr.
Greg Ciottone, a Harvard physician and Director of the Operational
Medicine Institute—who actually flew on one of the flights with
Armendariz, said testing all of the passengers on those flights would
"...be a worthwhile action to take." Ciottone, who is also Editor-in-Chief
of Disaster Medicine, said the reports issued by WHO and the CDC are
incomplete. "Even the authors," Ciottone noted, "point out that
the data [upon which the agencies based their opinions] is not perfect."
Someone arbitrarily pulled a mythical number out of midair and decided
that the airborne MDR-TB bacteria coughed up by an infected passenger
would not fatally affect anyone—or did they mean everyone—in less than
eight hours. "The problem we now face," Ciottone noted, "is the length
of time since the event. I think testing these individuals [to determine
precisely which ones are infected] would still yield some data that
we may be able to glean some useful information from."

In
addition to 21 airline flights, Armendariz has also driven into the
country (mostly at El Paso) . An internal DHS memo secured by the Washington
Times showed that Armendariz crossed the Ysleta Bridge into the United
States a total of 52 times. He crossed the Bridge of the Americas 17
times and twice at the Paso del Borte, twice at Presidio, Texas, twice
at the Santa Teresa Port of Entry in New Mexico, and once in Calexico,
California.

Armendariz
has had absolutely no trouble entering the United States even though
both Mexican and US authorities know who he is. Unlike Andrew Speaker
whose photo has been published in countless newspapers and on TV news
programs, the Mexican government and the US CDC have declined to release
photographs of Amado Armendariz that would help alert American travelers
that a man carrying a deadly, contagious disease was in their midst.
In fact, both refused to release either his real name—or the alias he
traveled under—even though they have known it for years. His name has
entered the mainstream only because a reporter for the Washington
Times uncovered it.

Last
week Sen. Joe Lieberman [I-CT], Chairman of the Homeland Security and
Government Affairs Committee said he was very disturbed by an apparent
lack of coordination between the CDC and DHS that would allow a Mexican
national infected with MDR-TB to cross the Southern border of the United
States 76 times without being detained. Particularly since Customs and
Border Protection [CBP] officials were first warned on April 16 that
Armendariz was infected.

On
May 31, someone at the CDC thought it appropriate to issue a warning,
but did little else since the CDC had officially adopted the WHO's lax
health risk enforcement standards. Dr. Ciottone, who is one of the world's
leading experts on disaster medicine, said the government's policy "...is
ill-founded, poorly researched, and puts the population at risk. If
the powers-that-be, who directly impact the health and well-being of
this country are going to stand by this theory that if you spend up
to 7 hours 59 minutes next to someone with active TB, you don't need
to be tested, then people will become ill."

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Last
week congressional lawmakers called for an official investigation to
determine why the CDC let Armendariz into the country—and why the DHS
nor other "need-to-know" federal agencies were left out of the loop.
Dr. Ciottone is pushing to force airline officials to release the names
of all passengers on each of the 11 domestic flights and the 10 international
flights they know Armendariz flew in order to do a TB skin test on all
of the passengers who were on those flights. Not notifying them, Dr.
Ciottone said, would be a serious mistake. "They should be tested,
and if positive, should undergo treatment as anyone who converts a skin
test would. [The passengers themselves] can also yield important data
that will help understand transmission of this disease. We simply don't
know enough about the transmission of tuberculosis on planes based on
the current data."

Jon Christian Ryter is the pseudonym of a
former newspaper reporter with the Parkersburg, WV Sentinel. He authored
a syndicated newspaper column, Answers From The Bible, from the mid-1970s
until 1985. Answers From The Bible was read weekly in many suburban
markets in the United States.

Today, Jon is an advertising
executive with the Washington Times. His website, www.jonchristianryter.com
has helped him establish a network of mid-to senior-level Washington
insiders who now provide him with a steady stream of material for use
both in his books and in the investigative reports that are found on
his website.